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Attribution Models

Models, credit and content, oh my!

Once you understand the value of attribution modeling you will need to know more about the various models that can be used. Each model has different rules for distributing credit. Some models give credit to the beginning of the customer journey, some give credit to the end. This guide gives an overview of some popular and some experimental models.

Popular Attribution Models

These are the most popular attribution models:

First Click: this model gives 100% of the credit for the event to the source of the very first interaction.
In the shoe store example, the magazine article would get 100% credit.

Last Click: this model gives 100% of the credit of the event to the source of the very last interaction. In the shoe store example, the Google AdWords link would get 100% credit..

Linear: this models gives credit evenly to every source that brought the users to your site. In the shoe store example, the Twitter and the Google AdWords link both get 50% credit.

Position Based: This model is a combination of first click, last click and linear. It gives 25% credit to the first source, 25% to the last source and the remaining 50% evenly to all the middle sources. The purpose is to acknowledge the power of the first and last, while not totally ignoring the middle interactions. In the shoe store example, both Twitter and AdWords would get 50% (there are no middle clicks).

Time Decay: This model gives exponentially more credit to sources very close in time to the event. Stated another way, it gives much less credit to older interactions and much more credit to the most recent. In the shoe store example Twitter would get ~43% and the Google AdWords click would get ~57%. As you can see, the three days between these clicks cause the closest click(AdWords) to get more credit. If the initial click from Twitter was two weeks before the event (instead of 3 days), the credit would shift to favor AdWords even more: 20% to Twitter and 80% to AdWords.

Custom Attribution Models

Interested in building a custom attribution model for your business? We love attribution models and their power to provide insights into your marketing success. Shoot us a note and we'll build you a custom model.